Added a few days later. I had forgotten that these go off line after a while, so here is the text:
Magnus Maximus (d. 388), Roman emperor in Britain and the western empire, was blackguarded after his death by Pacatus the panegyrist of his conqueror, the emperor Theodosius. The historical tradition is hostile to a failed usurper, as usual, but there are hints that he was respected in his time. St Martin's Gallic biographer says that he was ‘a good man in other respects, but corrupted by the advice of bishops’ (Sulpicius Severus, Dialogues, iii.11.2) and the Spanish writer Orosius comments that he was ‘an energetic and honourable man worthy of being Emperor, if he had not broken his oath and become Emperor by usurpation’ (Orosius, vii.34.9).
Early career
Maximus was born in Spain, at a place unknown; as emperor he created a new province in the north-east, but since he also created one in Gaul, this may not be significant. He was a kinsman and dependant of Theodosius's father, the Roman general Flavius Theodosius, with whom he campaigned in Britain (367–8) and Mauretania (373–4); in Mauretania he arrested a corrupt Roman official and two disloyal Moorish chieftains. Since the elder Theodosius was executed at the end of 375, Pacatus's reference to Maximus being ‘an exile and a fugitive’ (Pacatus, 31.1) may mean that he shared his patron's fall; but as this ‘exile’ is contrasted with the younger Theodosius's army command (presumably in 378), it need only mean that he was posted to Britain. There he was commander of the Roman garrison during Gratian's reign (r. 375–83); it is not known whether he was formally the dux, or held the higher rank of comes, but the latter is more likely, since it regularly implied command of mobile units.
Gratian made himself unpopular with his army by favouring certain barbarian recruits, and Maximus in Britain is also said to have resented not being more highly promoted. Pacatus guardedly remarks that he ‘boasted of his kinship’ with the emperor Theodosius and claimed his tacit support (Pacatus, 24.1 and 43.6). Indeed, since Theodosius's father had been executed in the names of Gratian and his infant brother, Valentinian II (although others gave the actual order), and since Theodosius not only recognized Maximus as co-emperor but after his execution protected Maximus's mother and daughter, this suspicion, even if untrue, was not unfounded. Maximus later claimed, like most usurpers, to have been forced into usurpation by the army; the soldiers may have thought he would be a worthier successor of Gratian's father, Valentinian I (r. 364–75), as indeed did Maximus himself, since he struck coins which imitated Valentinian's obverse portrait and reverse types and in his negotiations with Valentinian's younger son, Valentinian II, asserted a father's authority.
Emperor in the west
After being proclaimed emperor in Britain in spring or early summer 383, Maximus invaded Gaul with an army. Gratian was still at Verona on 16 June 383, but later that summer confronted Maximus near Paris. However, when after skirmishes his soldiers began to desert him for Maximus, and even his commander-in-chief Merobaudes changed sides, Gratian fled with a small escort for Italy. Maximus sent his cavalry commander Andragathius in pursuit, by whom Gratian was captured and perfidiously killed at Lyons on 25 August 383. Maximus, who insisted that he had not ordered Gratian's death, was now de facto ruler of Britain, Gaul, and Hispania, and resided at Valentinian I's old capital of Trier. The younger Valentinian (II), aged only twelve, nominally ruled Italy, the Balkan province of Illyricum, and Africa (roughly modern Tunisia) from Milan, and in their first negotiations Maximus insisted to his envoy Ambrose, the sainted bishop of Milan, that Valentinian should come to him ‘like a son to his father’ (Ambrose, letter 24.7). Ambrose eluded this demand, but after further negotiation the court at Milan grudgingly recognized Maximus's authority beyond the Alps.
The surviving sources are not explicit about the relations between the three emperors, but it can be deduced that Theodosius, who was preoccupied in the east with Goths and Persians, was prepared to recognize Maximus in the west if he left Valentinian alone. There is certainly no evidence that he actually promoted Maximus's rebellion against Gratian. He and Maximus struck a few coins in each other's name, and in 386 Maximus's praetorian prefect Euodius shared the consulship with Theodosius's younger son Honorius; Maximus's portrait was now formally displayed in the eastern empire. In effect, therefore, he was accepted as a member of the imperial college; an inscription from Tripolitania, an African province subject to Valentinian II, honoured all four emperors: Valentinian, Theodosius, his elder son Arcadius, and Maximus (whose name was later deleted). This was only a working arrangement, not a warm collegiality, but it might last while each emperor was preoccupied by his own problems. Thus Maximus is said by Orosius to have been ‘a formidable man, exacting tribute and military service from the most monstrous German tribes by the terror of his name alone’ (Orosius, vii.35.4). Orosius is exaggerating Maximus's strength, to prove that it was only by God's will that he fell, but Maximus himself told Ambrose that there were thousands of barbarians in his service who received rations from him (Ambrose, letter 24.4). There is numismatic evidence that he revisited Britain, perhaps to cope with the invasion of Picts and Scots recorded by the Gallic chronicle of 452 (which, however, implies it was in 383). Gildas alleges that Maximus stripped Britain of its army, administrators, and manpower, but his account has no independent value although it accidentally contains this truth: the usurpation was an important step, though it cannot be quantified, in the reduction of the Roman garrison. Maximus, as the last Roman emperor of Britain according to Gildas, was therefore claimed as their first ancestor by medieval Welsh kings, but this is a ninth-century invention. Historical deductions are invalid, for example that Maximus delegated authority in northern Britain to native chieftains; so too should be regretfully dismissed as fiction the medieval Welsh story of ‘Macsen Wledig’ (King Maxentius), the emperor of Rome who married the princess of Caernarfon.
Religious attitude
Maximus like Gratian was an Orthodox (Nicaean) Christian, an embarrassment to some Catholic students of history, as is clear from a comment by Augustine in The City of God (5.25); Maximus told Pope Siricius that he had come to the throne ‘straight from the baptismal font’, and regarded God as his patron and protector (letter 40 in the Collectio Avellana). To Valentinian II, whose Arian mother, Justina, was vainly trying to extort a church for Arian worship from Ambrose at Milan, Maximus wrote a disingenuous warning in 386 that it was dangerous to persecute the Orthodox. He asserted his own Orthodoxy by his unrelenting treatment of his fellow-Spaniard, the heretic Priscillian. Certain Spanish bishops had become suspicious of Priscillian's ascetic practices and teaching, which they equated with Manichaeism and sorcery; Maximus ordered that the case be heard by a synod at Bordeaux, but when Priscillian appealed from it to the emperor, Maximus sent him for trial before the praetorian prefect Euodius at Trier. Priscillian was tortured and beheaded, the first heretic to be formally executed, even if it was for sorcery. This intervention by the secular power was resented by leading western bishops like Ambrose and Martin of Tours, and it was in response to such criticism that Maximus told Pope Siricius that by condemning ‘Manichees’ he was upholding the unity of the church. His downfall, however, was subsequently attributed by Ambrose to quite another action, his edict of 387 or 388 which censured Christians at Rome for burning down a Jewish synagogue; they exclaimed: ‘the emperor has become a Jew’ (Ambrose, letter 40.23).
Conquest of Italy and death
In 387 there were negotiations between Valentinian II and Maximus to improve their accord, in which Maximus deceived Valentinian's envoy and followed after him with an army. His motives for crossing the Alps are unclear: to make Valentinian his puppet, perhaps, or (like Constantine in 312) to strengthen himself against an inevitable civil war. Italy fell without a struggle in summer 387, but Valentinian and his mother escaped by ship to Salonika where they appealed to Theodosius for restoration. The Roman aristocracy acquiesced, however, judging by the decision of the orator Symmachus to deliver a panegyric of Maximus in January 388. Theodosius himself was slow to react. According to the pagan Eunapius's hostile account, he delayed until he was offered the prospect of marrying Valentinian's seductive sister, Galla, but it is more likely that he needed time to mobilize against the formidable western army. In the event, he moved decisively: in summer 388 his army advanced up the Sava valley, defeated Maximus's brother Marcellinus and his other generals at Siscia (Sisak) and Poetovio (Ptuj), and then trapped Maximus himself at Aquileia. Maximus surrendered, perhaps in hope of mercy, but Theodosius's generals immediately executed him, probably on 28 July 388. His son Victor, whom he had left in Gaul as titular emperor (Augustus), was arrested soon after and also executed.
R. S. O. Tomlin
Sources
Pacatus, Panegyric to the Emperor Theodosius, ed. and trans. C. E. V. Nixon (1987) · Zosimus, Historia nova: the decline of Rome, ed. and trans. J. J. Buchanan and H. T. Davis (1967), iv. 35–46 · Sulpicii Severi libri qui supersunt, ed. C. Halm (Vienna, 1866) · Sulpicius Severus, Vie de Saint Martin, ed. and trans. J. Fontaine, 3 vols. (1967–9) · Orosius, ‘Historiarum libri septem’, Patrologia Latina, 31 (1846), vii.34–5 · H. Dessau, ed., Inscriptiones Latinae selectae (1892–1916) · L'Année Épigraphique, no. 58 (1960), 133–5 · Ambrose, Patrologia Latina, 16–17 (1845), nos. 24, 40 · T. Mommsen, ed., ‘Chronica gallica’, Chronica minora saec. IV. V. VI. VII., 1, 615–66, MGH Auctores Antiquissimi, 9 (Berlin, 1892) · Gildas: ‘The ruin of Britain’, and other works, ed. and trans. M. Winterbottom (1978), chaps. 13, 14 · P. J. Casey, ‘Magnus Maximus in Britain’, The end of Roman Britain [Durham 1978], ed. P. J. Casey (1979), 66–79 · D. N. Dumville, ‘Sub-Roman Britain: history and legend’, History, new ser., 62 (1977), 173–92, esp. 173–82 · Augustine, City of God, ed. and trans. H. S. Bettenson (1972), 5.15 · O. Guenther, ed., Collectio Avellana, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, 35 (1895–8), nos. 39, 40 · W. Ensslin, ‘Maximus’, Paulys Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenchaft, ed. G. Wissowa and W. Kroll, new edn, 14/2 (Stuttgart, 1930), 2546–55 · A. H. M. Jones, J. R. Martindale, and J. Morris, The prosopography of the later Roman empire, 1: AD 260–395 (1971), 588 · J. Matthews, Western aristocracies and imperial court, AD 364–425 (1975), 165–8, 173–82, 223–5 · H. Chadwick, Priscillian of Avila (1976), 42–3, 111–48.
